[Techtalk] Booting from CDROM

[Carla Schroder]

On Tuesday 17 December 2002 09:45, Meryll Larkin wrote:
> 12/17/02

> When I upgraded on my Developer box (RedHat 7.3, a computer which I did
> not build) I popped the CD into the CDROM and rebooted.  The computer
> booted to the CD.
>
> When I attempted the same with my Server, it booted to the hard drive
> and did not read the CD.  I am annoyed that my server is not defaulting
> to attempt to boot from a CD when a CD is in the CDROM drive at boot
> time.  I suspect this is my fault.
>
> When I run cat /etc/fstab on the Server and the Developer box, my
> results are identical.  When I entered the BIOS during the boot process
> and attempted to reset the primary master and slave, the boot process
> would not continue after I made the changes (error message) - which is
> what makes me think this is a hardware instead of a software issue.
>
> I suspect that I neglected to make the harddrive the slave to the CDROM,
> and I'm not sure if I should be messing with my cables, my jumpers, or
> if there is some other piece of software I don't know about that I could
> set.

Whoa, back up. A little review here, just to cover the bases: Hard drives 
should always be master to CDROMs. Master and slave only on the same IDE 
channel.  Even better with IDE drives is to have the hard drive and CDROM on 
separate channels, each as master. This makes more speed. Hard drive always 
comes first, IDE1, CD IDE2. This has nothing to do with boot sequence.

First step is make sure cabling and jumpers are correct. Then in your BIOS, 
set the boot order so CD comes before HD. Don't mess with masters n slaves, 
which I didn't know you could do in BIOS. Get your machine booting up and 
running, then see if it reads CDs at all. CDROMs die like fruit flies, the 
first sign of drive failure is not booting from CD.

Red Hat disks are fussy, if you can get a different bootable CD of any kind to 
test, that would be good too.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Carla Schroder
Bratgrrl Computing
www.bratgrrl.com
This message brought to you by
Red Hat 8 and Kmail
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~